Episode 253: Clionadh Raleigh on Reframing “Climate Security”

About half the world’s population lives in an area of active or latent conflict. And few corners of the planet are not feeling the effects of climate change. But in this week’s New Security Broadcast, researcher Clionadh Raleigh cautions against drawing too strong a connection between the two phenomena in an interview with ECSP Director Lauren Risi.“Conflict is a competition for power,” says Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex and the executive director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Because conflict’s roots cannot be found in “grievance, resource distribution, and population dynamics,” she continues, “there are conflict dynamics that play out irrespective of climate risk, and are not directly associated with environmental issues; hence, it is not useful to frame climate issues as security issues.” Raleigh says that her research on conflict points to “some indirect connections between conflict dynamics and climate change,” especially when they create “competitions in which some attributes of the environment, especially through patronage and other means of financing turn the entire scenario into a competitive interpretation of how elites are going to operate and contest against each other violently.”   One key element in Raleigh’s case is research that demonstrates that cooperation—and not conflict—is often found in regional communities with the highest climate risk and lowest potential to mitigate it. This is part of a larger pattern of cooperation in these communities, she adds.  Raleigh notes that studies indicate that at times, such broader community collaboration smooths the path for cooperation on climate initiatives—and signals the significance of creating and implementing effective adaptation plans. “The areas that have been able to build adaptation, like adaptive cooperation, managed to become resilient to conflict,” she says, “or to break down in that social and political order to resist that kind of violent competition when it stems from other sources.”One such case can be found in Kenya, observes Raleigh, “where there were peace committees throughout the country that allowed people to discuss and to mediate in situations related to resource distribution, and those mediations—especially when they were funded—were very successful.”  Nations such as Nigeria, she continues, offer a case study in collaboration failures rooted not in climate conflict but in structural challenges. In that country’s middle belt, Raleigh says, the failure of “local-based cooperative mechanisms” led to “massive conflict that has taken the form of livelihood-based competitions, rather than the climate-related conflicts.” In this context of research that argues for a broader view of conflict—as well as its causes and patterns—is the framing of climate security still useful? Raleigh says that it must be refined and given greater nuance—especially in the areas of cooperation and resilience—if it is to retain its usefulness. “I find that security framing that has been practiced for years has become outside of the situations, where we are talking about security outcomes,” she says, “it loses this nuance that we bring to it when it's being practiced.” The result, continues Raleigh, is that the framing can “create negative effects on the people who are supposed to be on the receiving end of better policies or better assistance…In these scenarios, security initiatives themselves cause insecurities among the people.” Raleigh levels particular criticism at what she sees as a pillar of climate security framing: a seeking out of regional insecurities and refashioning of them as climate-related. She argues that this ignores growing climate collaboration in favor of identifying communities to be presently or potentially “at risk.” The danger in doing so is a tendency to admit the future into evidence while spurning research on commu(continued)